2023-06-01 10:00:43
Almost 14 years ago, on June 1, 2009, an Airbus A330-200 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, between Paris and Rio de Janeiro. Almost 14 years later, while justice has acquitted Air France and Airbus, this tragedy has made it possible to advance aviation safety globally.
On June 1, 2009, the flight AF447 disappears over the Atlantic Ocean, killing 228 people. This is the deadliest accident in the history of Air France.
What happened ? Today, the BEA (Bureau of Investigation and Analysis) reconstructed the accident almost minute by minute.
We know, for example, that the captain went to take a nap a few minutes before the crash. Replaced by the relief co-pilot, the latter is then in the company of the co-pilot, who becomes responsible for the flight, in the absence of the captain.
The plane, under automatic pilot, enters the intertropical convergence zone, an area known to shelter cumulonimbus clouds rising up to 15 kilometers in altitude. To avoid turbulence, the pilots choose to circumvent the system of disturbances, by slightly modifying the trajectory to the left. A few minutes later, the autopilot disengaged, following the freezing of three Pitot probes. These probes located on the front of the aircraft are used to measure dynamic pressure, i.e. the pressure that the air exerts on the plane during its flight. The freeze rendered the probes inoperative, providing the pilots with erroneous information as to the true speed of the aircraft. The plane then began to stall, without the pilots realizing it. The latter pitch up the aircraft, in vain. The situation lasted nearly four minutes, before the aircraft fell and then crashed into the sea.
The plane broke up on contact with the ocean, at nearly 280 kilometers per hour. All the passengers died instantly, and most of the large pieces of the plane sank rapidly, more than 3000 meters deep.
The investigation, entrusted to the BEA at Le Bourget, will last for years, during which the investigators will reconstruct the flight down to the smallest detail. The trial which has just ended is above all an opportunity to observe how this tragic accident enabled the aviation security to be strengthenedand to draw lessons from this tragedy.
Thus, icing of Pitot probes is no longer a problem today. Indeed, these probes, which always have a tendency to ice up during certain phases of flight, have for some years been accompanied by an independent sensor, located in the air flow of the engines. Positioned in this way, there is no risk of this sensor freezing, and allows the pilot to know the speed of the aircraft relative to the ground, until the Pitot probes become operational once more.
Another notable development since the drama of the Rio/Paris flight is the automation of certain emergency maneuvers to take over from the crew. While the pilots of flight AF447 might not identify the current stall of the aircraft, forcing it to pitch up unnecessarily and ultimately leading to its fall, the investigation report clearly establishes that these human errors were decisive. Shortly following the accident, Boeing estimated that 80% of airline accidents were caused by human error. Hence the development of pilot assistance software, which allows the pilot to be assisted in certain situations in flight.
Automated aircraft rapid descent systems have also emerged, once once more to compensate for a lack of crew response during, for example, depressurization. The plane then descends, on autopilot, to an altitude of 4,000 meters, at which passengers no longer need the mask to breathe.
More generally, the collection of flight data and the use of this data now makes it possible to develop software that can adapt to flight conditions, with great precision, given the mass of data processed by these simulators.
The black boxes, which are the real safes storing the data of a flight, now transmit, for aircraft flying over maritime areas, the flight data live, in order to allow, if something does not work, to be able to determine the origin as quickly as possible. These black boxes are now also ejectable. As a reminder, the BEA had taken 2 years to find the black box of flight AF447.
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